The needle points to a milestone

The day she renamed her exercise tracker from CONFIDENTIAL to CONFIDENT was the day she went to shop for new clothes. She loved the pair of jeans she tried on so much that she walked out of the store in them. She just winked at the guy at checkout, who she thought was totally cute, and twirled around so he could scan her butt.

She had a spring in her step and a rhythm in her head. Even the panhandler at the red light at the intersection of busy and crazy streets didn’t dampen her mood. It was amazing what a machine in the bathroom could do to one’s temperament with the right number to report. Once she dreaded the ordeal. Now she eagerly anticipated the morning ritual of stepping on it.

She had promised herself to learn one new thing everyday. It usually ended up being a random new word from a dictionary, like it had been the day before, when she learned ‘Eunoia’,the shortest word in the language with all five vowels. Eunoia, a state of beautiful thinking, she repeated in her head a few dozen times. How could there be room for anger at the panhandler if she occupied her head with beautiful thoughts? Eunoia.

She stopped by a grocery store to buy vinegar. Not to cook. She never cooked. But to remove a wine stain from her carpet. Soak in vinegar and then wash with soap. That was her ‘one thing to learn new’ of the day. It was more than a wine stain she would be cleaning. It was a memory of a past life. A life of low self esteem and poor decisions. A life before treadmills and self-assurance. A life before the day she learned all about ‘Renaissance’.

Tonight she would wear her new dress for dinner with friends and get compliments on her looks. But tomorrow she would work out harder. If anything she had learned it was not to rest on her laurels. Maybe tomorrow she would learn how to use that confounding stepper machine at the gym